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Updated 01/01/2021 Since 2017 and the generalisation of the Open Research Data (ORD) pilot to all areas of Horizon 2020, you are expected to create and submit to the European Commission a data management plan (DMP). Here is a FAQ about it.  What is a data management plan? A DMP describes the data management life cycle for the data to be collected, processed and/or generated by a Horizon Europe project. What types of data are considered in a DMP? The ORD pilot applies primarily to the data needed to validate the results that are presented in scientific publications. However, other data can also be provided by the beneficiaries. The focus is on research data that is available in digital form. In a research context, examples of data include statistics, results of experiments, measurements, observations resulting from fieldwork, survey results, interview recordings and images. What should be included in a DMP? A DMP should include information on:
Am I obliged to do a DMP? By default, yes, but you can opt out at the proposal stage, grant agreement preparation and even after its signature by a grant agreement amendment. You need to provide one of these reasons for opting-out:
When should I prepare a DMP? As early as possible in your project. The Commission will expect your DMP to be submitted by six months after the project start. You are then supposed to update it regularly, at least once every reporting period or whenever important changes to the project occur due to inclusion of new data sets, changes in consortium policies or external factors. Should I talk about the DMP in the proposal? Yes, but you are just expected to create a draft DMP. This draft is not a complete version of your DMP, rather a quick summary of the standards that will be applied, how the data will be exploited and/or shared/made accessible for verification and reuse, and how the data will be curated and preserved. This information should be provided in the impact section under the dissemination and communication subsection. Make sure to make this text coherent with how the consortium plans to manage the project’s intellectual property. Also make sure to plan enough budget and time to look after the data management during your project. Note that the draft DMP is not assessed in the proposal evaluation, but its absence can penalise your evaluation. Is there a DMP template somewhere? Yes, the Commission provides an optional template here. What should I do with the data? In addition to keep an up-to-date DMP, you are expected to:
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Updated 01/01/2021 The impact section in your Horizon Europe proposal is the one causing you the most pain and you have probably let it aside until the end. Here is a guide about how to deal with the impact section of your Horizon Europe proposal. Impact is not project results What is expected in the impact section of a Horizon Europe proposal is not very clear and you might come to the conclusion that the impact of a project is its results. It is actually not exactly the case. Let us remind you the different components of a project idea:
The impact refers therefore to the consequences of the project results. Consequences on the society, the economy, research communities, policy makers etc. The impact is a change and the change has a magnitude. The impact is the value that the project has. This is the main reason why the European Commission should fund your project because remember, Horizon Europe is above all the Commission’s instrument to fund research projects to help them in their policies. Reason why you should pay attention to how you write your impact section. The impact is mostly about the future Even if some of the project’s impact can be experienced during its duration, most of it will come after the project’s completion. The project’s outputs should have a life after the project is finished. Yet, it is hard to anticipate it, which is why writing the impact section is so hard. Do not worry if you take a prospective mode when writing the impact, but make it as evidenced and quantified as possible (see next point). And be very specific when describing the impact. The impact should be measured As previously said, the impact is a (hopefully) positive change induced by the project’s results on various aspects of the society. The change can and must be measured. This is why it is highly recommended to define key performance indicators (KPIs) for impact assessment. There should be a KPI for each of the expected impacts and a target value set in a time frame. The impact will be experienced by a targeted audience The changes caused by the project will be felt by some specific audiences that you must clearly identify. It is highly likely that there will be several groups of people impacted by your project among:
When defining the KPIs and their targets, also think about each targeted audience to be as exhaustive as possible. Go beyond the expected impacts as set in the work programme It is highly convenient that the call text provides a list of expected impacts. You should definitely describe how your project will reach them, but do not restrict yourself to them. Think in a broader term such as environmental impact, employment, social issues, competitiveness etc. but keep specific. Once you have described the impact, it is easier to create a dissemination, exploitation and communication plan It is easier because you have defined two important features of these plans: what will be disseminated and to whom. You can learn more about setting your communication plan in our communication plan article and about IP in our intellectual property article. We’ll soon publish another article about the data management plan. Conclusion We hope that it is now clearer to you what impact is and how important for your proposal evaluation it is.  Discover other articles Updated 01/01/2021 You are reaching the concept and methodology section of your Horizon Europe proposal? Check with us if you have understood properly what is expected in this section.  Concept and methodology are two different things Although both the concept and the methodology answer the question of how you are going to reach your project’s objectives, they are two different yet complementary things. The methodology derives from the concept, so you have to start with the concept description first. The concept is more abstract than the methodology. It is the general approach to how you will solve the challenge addressed by your project. The concept includes the hypotheses that will be tested in your project and the assumptions about its expected results. They have to be based on a state of the art so show here that your concept is based on existing knowledge. However, this is also where you must prove the innovativeness of your approach. The methodology is a more practical and precise description of your experiments or activities of your project, how they are organised, and what the subjects and conditions of your experiments are. Use the technology readiness levels (TRLs) When describing your project’s concept, it is important to position it within the research to innovation funnel. For that, use the TRLs. Choose which TRL your project starts and at which TRL it will lead to. For a description of each TRL, check the Commission’s webpage dedicated to it. Links with national and international research and innovation activities This subsection of the concept and methodology is where you position your project among other relevant projects. Do not use this subsection to list randomly the projects your consortium has carried out in the past. Instead, clearly identify the project for which the outputs will lead to your project, as well as the other ongoing projects that might benefit from yours. To do so, conduct a project review on Cordis. Conduct a sex and gender analysis The sex and gender analysis is part of the concept and methodology section for a right reason: this is where you must review how your project relates to sex and gender. Have a look at our dedicated article to know more about how to conduct such an analysis. Keep it short It is tempting to write a very thorough state of the art and then a very detailed description of your methodology. Yet, the reviewers prefer straight-to-the point concept and methodology sections. The things you must achieve with this section are on the one hand, prove that you have an innovative yet feasible approach, and on the other hand that you know very well where your project is positioned, both in terms of TRL than in relation to other projects. You are not required to develop this section as much as in an academic paper, all the more that you have the section 3 “Implementation” to describe more precisely what will be done in the project. To conclude, the concept and methodology section is a very critical section of a Horizon Europe proposal. This is where you define how you will address the project’s objectives. You must convince that your project is well positioned within the state of the art while being innovative enough to justify its funding. Updated 01/01/2021 You are just starting to write a new Horizon Europe proposal by tackling its objectives. Here is a guide on drafting the perfect objectives by a professional grant writer.  1. Start with the context It is good practice to write an introductory paragraph before providing the objectives. In this paragraph, explain to the reviewers why they should bother with your project, which problem(s) you are trying to solve, who are facing the problems and why the current solutions, if any, are not addressing the problem properly. Then, your objectives flow logically because they address directly the challenges you have introduced. Make sure that they fit with the challenges specified in the work programme though! Also make sure the challenge you want to address fits with European policy priorities. 2. Define one overall objective then several specific objectives You will define only one overall objective that is simply addressing the challenge you just described. The overall objective goes beyond the project duration. However, be a little precise about its scope, do not try to solve the whole societal challenge in one project. Then, define the specific objectives, that will be addressed during the project duration. With your specific objectives, you generally outline the steps to achieve the overall objective, but they are not always sequential. In any case, the specific objectives allow to achieve the overall objective. The most important aspect to remember is that specific objectives are narrower in scope than the overall objective and are described in a more precise way (see below). 3. Make your objectives SMART It is not necessary to write too much text about your objectives, but make sure that for each of them you provide a quick description of how they are SMART, i.e. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timebound:
4. Do not confuse objectives with methodology One common mistake made in designing objectives is to describe what will be done in the project. This is a misunderstanding of what objectives are. Objectives are meant to be the achievements of the projects, its outcomes. The objectives answer the question “what” and not “how”, which is addressed by the methodology. 5. The whole proposal will be linked with your objectives Starting with defining your objectives is very important because the whole proposal relies on them. The approach/concept of your project and its methodology will allow to achieve these objectives. The expected impacts of your project depend directly on the achievement of your objectives. The work plan, i.e. the work packages will directly detail how you achieve each objective. It is actually advised to define one work package per specific objective. This simplifies the definition of the work package’s objective. The deliverables are the expected results of your objectives. You now know more about how to define your project objectives. This is a challenging and critical part of writing a proposal so make sure not to rush on it. By carefully designing your project’s objectives, you will have much less difficulty with the rest of your proposal. Updated 01/01/2021 Women constitute 52% of the total European population and 59% of first level university graduates [1], but they only represent 40% of employed scientists and engineers [1], and 30% of start-up entrepreneurs. Moreover, women hold less than 10% of patent applications. The figures justify efforts by the European Commission to tackle the gender gap in science and innovation. The Commission has developed the Gender Equality in Academia and Research organisations (GEAR) tool. It also proposes Horizon 2020 calls to target the gender gap in research and innovation. On this international day of women and girls in science, let us review the already-funded projects and the upcoming calls.  The already-funded projects A number of projects aimed at implementing gender equality plans have already been funded by Horizon 2020:
This page shows a lot more projects funded by Horizon 2020 to tackle the gender gap. Open Horizon 2020 calls There are 3 upcoming Horizon 2020 calls targeting gender gap, all with a deadline on the 15 April:
[1] Eurostat data Updated 01/01/2021 You have started writing your Horizon Europe proposal and are reaching the sex/gender analysis at the end of section 1? Here is a guide from a professional grant writer about how to address this analysis.  First, try to reach gender balance in your application There are two main aspects to the Horizon Europe gender analysis. The first is the gender balance in your consortium. Easy to understand but sometimes hard to reach in reality. Yet, gender balance is one of the criteria considered by evaluators to discriminate between several proposals with the same rankings. Therefore, you should try to achieve as much as possible a 50/50 balance between both genders in your consortium as well as in terms of responsibilities (task or work package leaders, steering committee etc.) Then, clearly highlight the balance in the core text of your proposal by providing the female/male ratio and names of the key female and male contributors in the project. Then, describe how sex/gender is relevant to your research Another criterion that is assessed by the evaluators is how deep and accurate is your evaluation of how sex/gender is relevant to your research and how you address it. In some cases, sex or gender have neither influence in your research design, nor is the scope of your research. It is ok but clearly state it in your proposal. If however sex or gender are important for your research, you have to describe how, why and how you will consider it in your research methodology. By important to your research, we imply different realities. The first is when differences between sexes have to be investigated in your research. This will therefore impact your research design, so you should explain how you will consider the sex variable in your design of experiment. You may have not thought about considering sex as a variable to test in your research so ask yourself about your assumptions for your research or if some gender-related issues have not been addressed that might be of interest. The second possibility is when the outcomes of your research may impact differently people of both genders. You will have to explain what type of impact is expected and how you intend to reach specifically to both genders in terms of research dissemination. You may think that your research outcome will not differentiate between genders, but think twice whether your innovation might not be designed specifically for each gender. Finally, and this is the most challenging aspects, there can be some gender assumptions that might influence your research priorities, questions or methods. You will have to question yourself whether you have such assumptions and if so, consider testing them in your research. This is actually an important topic, since gender norms may influence your research agenda. Assign resources to sex/gender studies The good news if you are not familiar with sex and gender studies is that you can add a specific task tackling it and it is an eligible cost. You are also encouraged to hire gender specialists within your consortium or train your staff on these aspects. The costs related to gender training can also be claimed! You have understood now how critical sex and gender are to a Horizon Europe proposal. It would be a pity to lose points in your evaluation by not addressing sex and gender properly. You have now all the tool to do so. If you want to learn more on the topic, you can visit the gender innovation website of the Stanford University. |
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